July 1, 2003

Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction Found

Rumsfeld: Cache in Jersey City Locker "the Mother Lode"

Iraq's long sought weapons of mass destruction have been found in a rented locker at a public storage facility in Jersey City, N.J., just across the Hudson River from New York City, the Pentagon said today.

"I told you we'd find them," a jubilant Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a Pentagon press briefing. "It took longer than we thought and they weren't exactly where we thought they would be, but we have them. This is the WMD mother lode."

Rumsfeld said that a "preliminary inventory" of the find indicated "they're all there." He said they were stored in a locked room 10 feet wide and 24 feet deep and nine feet high.
The Defense Secretary refused to say exactly how many or what type weapons had been found. "It's your typical assortment of garden variety weapons of mass destruction you'd expect a tin pot dictator to have," he said. He also declined to say who had rented the storage room, or when it was rented.

Pressed by reporters to justify his claim that all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were stored in that one room, Rumsfeld said: "Of course, theoretically speaking, it's possible there are others. There are knowns that he we know about and knowns that we don't know about. Then there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. But based on our intelligence, which, as you know, has proven to be very accurate in the past, we're certain, or at least as certain as we can be, that this is it."

The Pentagon refused to provide the street address of the locker facility or its name. But Ahmed Al-Tikriti, an attendant at Eisenberg Brothers Storage, a public locker facility in Jersey City, said that a U.S. Army convoy of armed soldiers and several car loads of men dressed in grey business suits, wearing wraparound sunglass and carrying machine guns, burst through the locked front gate of the facility about 5 a.m. today and presented a search warrant naming locker 312-C.

"They had helicopters and everything," Al-Tikriti said. "They climbed down ropes while soldiers on the ground broke open the lock."
Al-Tikriti said the soldiers and the plainclothesmen spent about two hours loading the locker's contents into trucks. He said they also seized all the facility's rental records.

Asked what he knew about the contents of the locker 312-C, Al-Tikriti said that about three weeks ago he helped "three Italian gentlemen" unload a truck filled with new television sets still in their boxes. "The televisions filled the entire room," he said.

For his help, Al-Tikriti said they gave him one of the televisions, which he took home to his apartment in Jersey City. "But don't tell anyone. I could get into trouble with them," he said.

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